'The Following' too violent for broadcast TV

The timing is bad, but even if the nation wasn't engaged in a "conversation" about media violence in the sad wake of the Newtown, Conn., killings, "The Following" does not belong on network television.

The timing simply couldn't be worse for Fox to introduce the new Kevin Williamson series "The Following" Monday night. But even if the nation weren't supposed to be engaged in a "conversation" about media violence in the sad wake of the Newtown, Conn., killings, "The Following" does not belong on network television.

That's a tough sentence for me to write. I don't like censorship. I continue to believe the film and television ratings systems are mostly window dressing to make those respective industries look like the good corporate citizens they generally are not. I believe strongly that viewers should make informed choices on their own.

I honestly don't know if watching a particular movie or TV show, or playing violent video games, has a direct, one-to-one impact on vulnerable viewers, spurring them to commit violent acts. There's simply so much violence slamming into our brains from one source or another, hour after hour, that I can't help wondering if it hasn't cheapened our concept of life and death. That's what our national conversation needs to focus on, and until it does, until we step back and consider the larger, more complicated picture, any decision on whether to arm teachers or toughen gun laws may not make a substantive or lasting difference.

"The Following" is a very violent series about an alcoholic former FBI agent named Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon), called back after the escape of a notorious serial killer named Joe Carroll (James Purefoy, "Rome"). Since Hardy was the one guy who could bring Carroll down before, the FBI hopes he can do it again, despite the fact that Hardy has a pacemaker, regularly fills his water bottle with vodka and had an affair with Carroll's ex-wife, Claire Matthews (Natalie Zea, "Justified").

Carroll's recapture doesn't mean anyone's safe from him. The former literature professor is masterminding further killings from his jail cell that are carried out by a group of followers who share his sick belief in the supposed beauty of savage murder. He's especially fond of removing eyes from his victims and tells us how he has to cut through seven separate muscles. Ice picks slam into eyes and geysers of blood erupt from victim's necks in scene after scene of stomach-turning carnage.

The pilot isn't bad and the performances are pretty good, especially from Bacon, who is making his debut in series TV. The problem with "The Following," though, isn't that by the second episode, you get the template of Williamson's gotchas — that the most innocent-seeming characters are actually Carroll's minions — it's that the violence is so gratuitous, it actually ruins what could have been a very good psychological thriller.

The most important ingredient for scaring an audience is surprise, but Williamson, the writer of the "Scream" movies, falls back on so many cliches, you'd have to be an idiot not to know that, for example, the second time Claire looks in her bathroom mirror, she's going to see the phony cop behind her, not the real cop who's supposed to be guarding her while the FBI hunts for her young son, whom Carroll has had kidnapped.

That's why the violence is gratuitous: It's one of the very few things that "The Following" has in its otherwise empty arsenal to try to horrify an audience. If the show had been better crafted, it wouldn't need the overabundance of slice-and-dice effects. The writing and characterizations are never even remotely believable.

The more you watch the show, the worse it becomes, because the worse and more predictable the gore becomes.

Does violence have a place in entertainment? Of course it does, but there's a huge difference between the violence of, say, a series like "Dexter" and that of a TV drama larded up with excruciating, blood-soaked scenes of murder and mutilation because its script is too weak and unbelievable to capture viewers' attention on its own.

There is also the issue of "The Following" landing on broadcast TV. Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk's far superior, smart and witty "American Horror Story" is on Fox's edgier cable sister, FX. "Dexter" airs on Showtime. It's not just that these shows are both superior to "The Following," or that they make a more intelligent and contextually valid use of violence: It's that their subject matter is more appropriate for cable. "The Following" would also be more fitting on cable.

Of course, this show was created long before the real-life horror at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Because the show was so far along, it probably would have been costly for Fox to delay its premiere because of sensitivity to the killings in Connecticut. Maybe so, but at least Fox should have delayed the launch of the show or moved it to FX (although, frankly, it's simply not as good as most original FX fare).